Digging For Gold
by waterlit
Summary: The pursuit of happiness. Slight implied AllenLenalee, KandaLenalee and LaviLenalee.


Disclaimer: I own nothing heh.

* * *

They all meet in an abandoned mine under the dark, dark sky, brought together by the tremulous hand of fate. The cobwebs fall and throttle the living, and they pick up their pickaxes and heave against the rocks.

Heave-ho, heave-ho,

Here we go.

[[]]

The sounds of the night mingle with the faint whispers of shovels hitting rocks. Lenalee smiles and leans back and remembers a time when she lay upon an iron bed, handcuffed from the world and fought with an iron will to mine for her gold.

But now she is free of those shackles…

Her quill goes _taptaptap_ against soft paper and she looks up to see the little sparks of fire burning in the fireplace. _Winter is coming_, she muses, _and the damp will harm those who mine with all their hearts._

She tugs her hair behind her ear and shivers in the long draught. _It will be a cold morning_, she thinks, as she folds pen and paper into dark corners, shuts her thoughts away into the dark recesses of her weary mind and scrambles into bed.

[[]]

She glides down the dark corridors, coffee tray in her hands, and slides into the science division with gleaming eyes.

"Coffee?" She asks and neatly lands her guttering candle atop a desk.

She watches patiently as dozens of grubby hands blackened with the soot of work and eyes grey, sunken, tinged with the fingers of sleep come towards her. Her nimble fingers make light work of the mugs; they are on the tray one minute and gone the next.

Her satellite-bright eyes soften at the sight of the scientists hard at work, armed with pencils, paper, even equipment she's sure doesn't really exist. _They work too hard_, she thinks, _far too hard_.

"Get some rest," she suggests, and dull eyes turn towards her.

"We can't." Reever tells her. "We can't."

And so they can't. But her heart aches, all the same, watching them – grown men and women, all of them – bend over their papers and books with sighing fingers and askew hair and throbbing eyes, delving deep into the scientific unknown for the sake of the world.

She thinks she knows how miners' wives and daughters feel now, seeing the scenes they do when they visit with food and drink. She can feel the tug at her heartstrings; why are these men and women, some of whom have families back home, digging so desperately amid paper and coffee, for foreign gold?

She picks up the tray and leaves, candle left on the desk.

Komui smiles after her as he twirls his mug. He knows that she knows that they are all just trying their very best to capture the elusive little nymph with her little jug of happiness.

[[]]

She fiddles with the long strands of hair falling over her shoulder; she brushes them with an ivory comb and looks at her hands and wonders how they ever remained so soft and white. For they should be roughed and calloused; these are the hands on which she has fallen time and again, scraped, torn; these are the hands she has used to feed and comfort her friends; these are the hands she has grown up with, the hands which have survived a whole millennium of suffering with her throughout her sixteen years.

The thunder roars and the lightning calls; outside the window, the raindrops fall.

Lenalee wonders if the mine will flood. _Not tonight_, she prays, _not tonight, not tonight_.

But the _pitter-patter_ of angry tears on her window wakes her up, and she wonders when the dam will break and the roaring water will spill over the edge of eternity and toss bodies into wasted isles of water.

[[]]

Allen is all of sixteen and Lenalee is all of seventeen and they sit together and feel all of ninety. Allen rubs his sleep-tightened eyes with gloved hands and picks the cobwebs of dreams from his face. He looks at Lenalee, youth gleaming in his too-bright eyes.

She writhes within and thinks that he looks like a deer caught in a hunter's snare, with thread and rope binding him to his hapless fate. But he smiles plentifully (more than enough for them all) and the edges of his eyes crinkle into half-moons. His shovel-like left arm makes light work of breakfast, and together the duo head out into the mine.

Mission: - - -

Lenalee's eyes scan the page. Allen doesn't even bother reading his copy of the mission report. He hums softly, tapping red gloved fingers on the windowsill and watches the world go by.

"Aren't you upset?" She asks, ignoring Link's death glares. "Why aren't you upset with Central?"

"I was." He finally looks at her. His eyes glitter strangely in the light glinting off the snow outside. "But I must walk on. I have to dig my path."

He holds his shovel close and studies the sky. When he does get down to digging, Lenalee swears she can hear soft footfalls sliding into the darkness. _Dig on, Allen_, she tells him silently, her eyes flickering with the itch of not-quite-water, _you will get your gold someday yet_.

[[]]

Lenalee finds Lavi in a dark tunnel one autumn day. He is drenched in crimson leaves, with moss-green twigs in his flaming hair. She crouches by him and silently holds out the platter of food. He grabs for the hard bread, and chews on it, before he silently retrieves his pickaxe and continues to dig the vein he has discovered.

"Why so silent?" She finally asks. _"_You're usually not this sullen_."_

He takes stock, fingers the whispery grain of gold, and turns back. The hard lines around his one eye melt into an incongruous whisper. "I'm just tired."

"Tired…" she echoes, fingering the splotched walls of the tunnel. "You, Lavi?"

He nods and she wants _oh so badly_ to wipe that empty smirk off his face, and then to teach him to smile. To really truly smile.

But for now she settles for rubbing his back. "Oh Lavi…"

He glances at her and then looks back at his shovel. His eyes are misty, with the hints of tears at their edges. She puts her hand in his soft, fiery hair and finds that underneath all the dirt and grit, it is so unacceptably soft.

Lavi sits heavily, and he looks at her. "Am I disappearing?"

"You're here, healthy and whole."

"I'm not. I'm breaking into pieces, I'm falling apart…"

"Lavi…"

"Do you think I can dig myself out? I think I can. The more I delve the more likely I will be able to find some treasure trove holding a small part of my scattered soul."

He stands again and goes back to digging. Lenalee sighs and wishes she didn't see the broken pieces of his soul ablaze in his one eye. It's green like jade, his pupil is, and it smacks of envy and discontent and in his heart, she knows, pure confusion reigns.

She wants to pat his sorrows away and help him dig for himself in the hard, barren ground, but she is a girl without a sinewy build and she is helpless here too, miles under the ground.

[[]]

She confronts Kanda at the edge of a tiny stream; he lies there back to the ground and eyes fixed on the purple clouds, his hands grasping his sword to his chiselled chest. She trips oh-so-slightly over his abandoned pickaxe, and he grunts and turns and looks at her with a piercing glare.

"Kanda."

_Grunt. _

He has noticed her presence, she grants him that. She nudges him gently with her toe and waits for him to respond.

"What is it?" He sits up.

"Why aren't you at work?"

"What, mining?"

Lenalee merely stares at him with a slight smile on her pretty, pale face.

"I don't feel like it."

"Have some bread?" she finally asks with the wind in her eyes. "Milk?"

"No."

"You may starve."

"For all you care."

"That's not true." She frowns and doles the bread out.

"I hate bread."

"So you do. But you need to eat, all the same!" She implores him to eat with a feathery glance and a strong-sounding voice.

"Che", but he takes the bread and tears it into pieces with his wavering fingers. She watches as a small piece – dry, crumbly, bent – edges its way between his razor-sharp teeth.

"I've given up digging," he tells her out of the blue, a crumb of bread on his upper lip, "I just lie here and watch the clouds weave across the sky."

"Why?"

"I don't feel like digging."

"You won't get any results this way…"

"I don't intend to."

Lenalee sighs and prays for Kanda when night falls. _Please let him stumble out of apathy_, she whispers into the darkness, _please let him relearn how to use his tools, how to carve tunnels and search for glorious gold._

[[]]

Lenalee retreats into her room at night and thinks of an empty well. She'd leaned over it one wispy winter night when the snow fell like cotton fluff and Komui was nowhere to be found and she was all alone at the edge of her world.

_Are we like that now? _

She remembers the pain and determination flashing in Allen's eyes, and she can feel the fire in him – the fire that will give him the strength to tear the cold arena of hell apart and save those dear departed souls. She feels a pang that he has to go through so much, so much, with so little given to him.

Lavi's not much better; he's older, but so much more confused than she has ever been. Her destiny has been set out for her since the day her parents died under a shell of black dust and cold fire, and her innocence is all hers. But Lavi – Bookman Junior – has found that a heart is a heavy burden. He is stifled by its weight and nothing she does can help him sieve through the soil and the mud. The road is long and he must yet walk for miles before he can see the horizon.

Kanda too labours long amid the lonesome dark, beneath the crying silver tears of the night-sky stars. Lenalee prays for him and brings him food and sits with him, but that's as much as she can do. There is hurt writ in his eyes and a cold, slow-burning anger dormant in his hidden, locked heart of hearts, and it will be eons before his sorrow can pass away into the deep shadows where they belong.

For now, Lenalee fiddles with the loose strands of hair on her head. Her pickaxe is in the room, somewhere, and tomorrow she will head out to the mines. Maybe she will be able to help dig out some much needed gold. But for now, she sits back and glances in the mirror and smiles a half smile.

There may be cobwebs and spiders aplenty deep in the eaves of the night, and shadows mixed with fear lurking yet in the man-hewn caves under the soil, but Lenalee is not afraid. She will set off for the deep recesses tomorrow with a guttering candle in her hands and a rusty pickaxe upon her back and meet her world under the well-knitted grass above the mines.

She smiles as she thinks of the glimmer of gold in flickering candlelight, and the reflected glimmer in the eyes of those she holds dear.

* * *

A/N: I kind of like the style in which I wrote this one. And don't let it bother you if you don't understand this fic; I don't either, but you're welcome to ask me if you really can't let it go. It's just a lot of thoughts lumped together and polished up into this, so yeahh. This fic has been heavily influenced by many works; I've taken a quote (about a heart being a heavy burden) from the Japanese animation-movie Howl's Moving Castle and the rhyming portions within this were all influenced by my all-time favourite author Resmiranda (if you haven't read her works, you should!).

I hope you liked it! Reviews would be much appreciated (: And thanks for reading!


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